Let’s give
Apple
a little credit. To build a company worth close to $1 trillion, you need to think a few steps ahead. And that is exactly what Apple demonstrated at Tuesday’s fall launch event, which included the debut of the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max.

The company's stock ended Tuesday up 1.2%, its best performance on an iPhone announcement day since Apple unveiled the iPhone 5 in September 2012.

Heading into the two-hour-long event in the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, Calif., the conventional wisdom on Wall Street has been that this would be an off year for the iPhone. The world would largely ignore the iPhone 11, while awaiting the first Apple phones to use the 5G wireless standard, which are widely expected to debut a year from now. Investors already have been fretting about slowing iPhone sales and have been focused instead on the ability of Apple (ticker: AAPL) to drive revenue growth in other parts of its business, in particular via peripheral devices (AirPods and Apple Watches) and services like Apple Card, iCloud, and Apple Music.

But leave it to Apple to cut right, just when everyone expected them to cut left. What Apple argued persuasively is that while the world is zeroed in on the power of having more bandwidth once 5G networks arrive, the real power in having a mobile supercomputer in your pocket is about images. Almost the entire discussion around the new phones — in particular the higher-end Pro versions — focused on their increasingly powerful ability to produce professional quality images and video. The new Pro models, for instance, now feature three separate lenses, including both wide angle and telephoto lenses, effectively giving the phones a 4x optical zoom capability.

The new cameras are more capable than the previous generation of iPhones and come with some nifty new tools, like the ability to take a quick video while shooting still photos by just pressing and holding down the shutter button. And get ready to hear a lot about the new slow- motion capability of the front-facing camera. For better or worse, people are already psyched to take “slowfies.” Today, a meme was born.

Just a few years ago, Apple made a similar pivot with the Apple Watch, with the realization that health and fitness apps were the best reason for switching away from old-school analog watches, not simply the ability to have various watch faces or to take calls Dick Tracy-style. Apple has figured out that any phone can make calls or run standard apps — what really differentiates the new phones are their ability to take beautiful images. If you had 5G, you could upload them faster — but faster networking speeds won’t make the images better.

A few other observations from Tuesday’s events:

—Don’t underestimate the value of the best new Apple Watch feature — an always-on display. That’s going to be a game-changer for people who simply want to be able to glance at their phone to check the time, or see progress on a fitness tracker. It improves the performance of Apple Watch in a meaningful way.

—But also note that Apple is keeping the Series 3 watch around at a low price ($199) while killing off the Series 4 watches, which are basically replaced by Series 5.

—The company’s approach on Apple TV+ finally became clearer, as Apple set an aggressive $4.99 price for the new service — with a free year for people who buy new hardware. (Like a new iPhone, say.) On the one hand, you could argue that the low price (below even the $6.99 that
Disney
is going to charge for Disney Plus) is a sign of competitive aggression, but you could also argue that it reflects that Apple will start with very little programming, and zero back catalog. In Disney’s case, the back catalog of Disney animation, Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel films is what makes the service attractive. For Apple’s streaming service, there are only new shows, and so far, not that many of them.

While it would be easy to dismiss Apple as a second-tier player in streaming video, that was also once the case in music, where it has since become a serious competitor to market leader Spotify. Apple is playing a long game, they have the capital to spend on new content — and they are not being shy about spending it.

—For the short-run, the more interesting offering might be Apple Arcade, which will launch with more than 100 original games for just $4.99 a month. (You’ll notice Apple did not say how many TV shows they would have at launch.) If you like even a couple of the games, this seems like an attractive price for plenty of entertainment — and the price covers all family members. If any of their games go viral, the potential here is real. (And you know you want to play the new Frogger game, right?)

Here’s what we didn’t get today: Anything with wireless charging. Any updates on AirPods. Substantive updates to the iPad hardware. (Other than a new entry level iPad with a slightly larger screen and improved connectivity to removable keyboards.) We also didn’t get any of the typical corporate updates on things like the number of devices sold. (Apple has moved away from providing details on unit sales.)

And one interesting Apple-esque twist is that as Tim Cook introduced various colleagues to come on stage to perform demos or launch new products, he’d just call them by their first names, and never explain who they were.

The unstated message seemed to be that what matters at Apple is the products, not the demo gods.

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